I wasn’t precocious; it was circumstantial. I was living on a commune, but we weren’t doing the usual free love thang. We were 1500 hippies the press referred to as the “Technicolor Amish” because of our combination of tie dyes and traditional values. We were sexual conservatives. No sex if you weren’t engaged. No dating nonmembers or anyone who had been a member less than six months. Marriage is sacred.

Some of what motivated us was philosophical. We were feminist, pro-life, and compensating for the sexual lassitude that had created so many irresponsible hippy parents.


A lot of what motivated us was practical. We lived close-packed with each other. We didn’t come and go. Members planned to stay on the commune forever. Dating a member of the commune was like dating someone from work. If anything went wrong you wouldn’t be able to steer clear of each other. Promiscuity in close quarters is chaos.

And we were busy doing everything for ourselves the old back-to-the-land, labor-intensive way and so were too busy for a lot of romantic and sexual mischief. And besides, of the 1500 commune members, 700 were children and most of the rest were married. That left maybe 20 eligible singles per gender.

I spent most of my early twenties celibate, not by choice but because my life didn’t afford me the opportunity for anything else.

Given the circumstances–scarcity, close quarters, lots of collaborative work, an emphasis on baby-making, nowhere to escape to if you broke up with someone–marriage came naturally. Given how much circumstances drove me to it, I lucked out marrying such a wonderful, kind, generous, considerate woman. We stayed together 17 years and are still friends.

My father cautioned me against marrying a non-Jew. I told him I was marrying into my tribe. My commune had “spiritual beliefs” and “tribal ways,” and my wife was as committed to them as I was. We both assumed we would live our full lives on the commune. We agreed about everything and reveled in our profound compatibility.

We were so in sync that the idea to leave the commune struck us both simultaneously. Fifteen years later we broke up over irreconcilable differences. Now we revel
in the liberation we granted each other in the divorce. She’s better off free of our constraints and I am likewise.

In the throes of our divorce, I took it as an embarrassing failure and wondered anxiously whether the fault was hers, mine, or ours. I remember toward the end calling our marriage a failure to her face. My soon-to-be ex-wife said, “It didn’t fail. It lasted 17 years.” Around that time I confessed to an acquaintance that we were getting divorced. She asked how long we lasted, and when I told her she said, “Wow, 17 years . . . a good long run.” These comments were a comfort.

“A good long run” is a pleasantly optimistic way to reflect on any sincere effort that doesn’t quite succeed. That 17 years was considered a good long run also reveals shifting cultural attitudes. My 17-year marriage still impresses people occasionally, as though we were an exception in the moral wasteland of casual noncommitted partnerships.

My friendship with my ex also impresses. We both eventually got over the question of whose fault it was. Hers, mine, and ours? All three, but there’s a fourth factor as well.

It’s “ours” writ large–the social, economic, and cultural context that constitutes the terrain upon which we form relationships, romantic or otherwise. That terrain has changed radically in the course of my lifetime and explains, I believe, a lot more of what breaks couples up than we give it credit for.

To appreciate the context, look at things like a social scientist, setting aside what you think people should do for long enough to look at what people are likely to do given the tangible costs and benefits of the options they face. Think like an economist, for example.

Bonding for the long term in marriage or otherwise is a bit like partnering in business or hiring each other as employees. People are risky investments. We get sick, we change our minds, we become unreliable. In business we see a trend toward automation and outsourcing as alternatives to hiring long-term employees and providing full benefits. Robotics, automatic payroll systems, offshore tech support services, RFID chips (the little devices that will soon eliminate thousands of check-out clerk jobs)–the market has no way to resist inventing and absorbing labor-saving innovations that cut reliance on unreliable human resources.

We may lament our precipitous decline in loyalty, but in business, loyalty comes second to profitability and efficiency, so at least within the system we have, the trend is inevitable. Businesses can’t afford to leave profits and efficiencies on the table where other businesses will grab them. Blaming a particular company for divorcing its employees may be therapeutic, but it’s focusing at an unproductive level of analysis.

The outsourcing and automation trends are affecting marriage as well. Think of how many of the traditional glues that bind a marriage together are now outsourced
or automated.

A cook? Microwaves, preprocessed foods, dishwashers, takeout.

Company at home at night? TV, movies, video games, online chat, the Internet, pets.

Romance? Romantic movies and novels.

Someone to take care of us when we get old? Insurance, retirement homes.

Engagement that extends us into the world? A vast expanding array of leisure activities and hobbies.

Child-raising? Preschools, lessons, and schools.

Sex? Match.com, tolerance, porn, vibrators.

Some scorn these alternatives as if they don’t or shouldn’t substitute for the real deal. The fact is, they do. Not completely and not exclusively–sometimes the substitute makes you crave the real deal all the more. Still, to the extent we are able to reliably substitute automated and outsourced products and services for those that partnership provides, it reduces the reasons to stay together.

But aren’t there other reasons to stay together? Indeed, and our habits of bonding for the long term lean ever more heavily on these for their justification. We become increasingly obsessed with finding true love, getting and sustaining ego-affirmation, maintaining hot marital sex. We need these or else a voice whispers, “Why bother? I can outsource most of the rest.” Invention is the mother of necessity. Our inventions satisfy some needs, putting pressure on other needs to bear the whole weight of the bond. In the old days you needed to stay married. Your survival depended on your collaborations. What are the collaborations these days? Dinner out? Working on the relationship? Seeing movies?

Reasons to stay together are harder to find, but if the compatibility is strong enough that shouldn’t matter. Unfortunately, an erosive circumstantial force is active on that front too. Culture has become so heterogeneous it’s harder than ever to find someone who is and will stay compatible. My marriage, for instance–we went from perfectly compatible to perfectly incompatible in 17 years. What are the odds of that happening in this day and age? Very high. Statistically the more states two things can be in, the lower the probability that they will stay in matched states. The same is true for lifestyles. Compare our pastime options to our parents’ options. It’s simply statistically more likely that over time we’ll drift from being mutually supporting to mutually disappointing in our pursuits.

My wife and I had less and less to talk about as our interests diverged. We simply chose radically different pursuits from the overstuffed pantry of options. Neither of us chose bad things, but the things we chose drew us away from each other. It’s not that we didn’t try to appreciate each other’s interests. Seventeen years, remember. We had a great run but eventually ran out of willingness to compromise.

But what about the children? Aren’t couples as likely to find each other and stay together for the kids? Isn’t there some age-old biological imperative driving us, or at least the women among us, to bond?

For 3.6 billion years the only game in town was baby-making. Biological reproductive success is life’s overarching goal and all persistent behavior that evolved served that goal either directly or indirectly.

Human cultural, technological, and symbolic capacities evolved originally in the service of making children, but by now they have taken on a life of their own. We now have two games in town–making children and making brainchildren, or more accurately propagating children and brainchildren, since we don’t produce either from scratch. We propagate children through our genes and our parental care, but when we work, go to church, read books, play music, watch TV, and engage in countless other adult activities, we’re also propagating brainchildren, regardless of whether the activity enhances our prospects of biological reproductive success or not. Indeed, for the past few thousand years brainchildren have competed with children for adult attention, and brainchildren are gaining ground.

In the information age propagating brainchildren can make you money. In many marriages today, both partners make an income in the brainchild trade, and are thus no longer as dependent on each other for income, either.

Around the time my wife left me, I noticed a trend among some married women of my generation. I called it Mid-wife Crisis. Midway through the time they expected to be a wife, they wanted to mid-wife themselves into a new identity, beyond mothering children and back into mothering brainchildren. As young women they’d been as likely as young men to be drawn to proliferating brainchildren, but then, for some, the shift to baby making became a biological or cultural priority. Mothering beckons, women succumb, and with the wife distracted during the early years, the husband more often than not gets away with spending a lot more time in the brainchild arena than the wife does. That is, until the kids are old enough, the maternal hormones subside, and the brainchildren beckon with a vengeance. But by then there’s a huge imbalance. The husband doesn’t show enough respect; but the wife isn’t culturally engaged enough to be interesting. Maybe the husband wanted to keep her down, but maybe she shouldn’t have allowed it. So whose fault is mid-wife crisis? His, hers, or theirs? Again, a lot of it is circumstantial–new circumstances to which we have yet to adapt.

People have countered my argument here by saying it’s callous and insensitive to draw parallels between love and economics. Love is what counts. They have a point, but it’s one of two. I find it equally insensitive to ignore the parallel to economics. By ignoring it, we end up blaming our partners and ex-partners for behaviors that made sense given our radically changing collective socioeconomic circumstances. Ignoring the context in which we love forces us to personify the problem we encounter in love. It’s him; it’s her. Ironically, that makes it even harder to hold a marriage together.

Which is kinder, holding out for the eternal constant ideal of true love and blaming ourselves and others when we fall short, or recognizing that love is context-dependent and forgiving ourselves and others at least a little for responding to the changing contexts?

In their purest forms the two alternatives represent two different definitions of love. One is romantic fundamentalism: Love is this pure indefinable magical essence that renders all material matters moot. The other is romantic pragmatism: Love is what we call it when all material matters configure so as to make us feel a certain way. Like the way I felt at 24 when my hormones were popping and I hadn’t been with anyone in three years and everyone else was married, and this lovely woman seemed interested in me–I think that WAS love, even if–after a good long run–circumstances changed and we went our separate ways.

Like many words, care means different kinds of things. It has its descriptive meaning–its denotation: Caring is a certain kind of behavior. But it also has its prescriptive meaning–its connotation: Caring is good. You should care. Being uncaring is bad.

Combining denotation and connotation you get a rule: if caring, then good; if uncaring, then bad. Someone who calls you uncaring speaks with the authority of simple description–but smuggled into the description is an accusation that can make you feel guilty.

When you stop to think about the implied rule that caring is always good, it’s obviously absurd. If caring is always good, you should never stop caring about anything and anyone. You should always care about everything and everyone.


Since that’s impossible, we bend either the word’s denotation or its connotation. That is, we redefine caring behavior (”I do care; I just don’t feel like being with or helping you”), or we challenge the assumption that caring is always good (”It’s true, I don’t care anymore; I’ve chosen to move on”). The former is kinder, the latter more honest.

It would be nice if the rule for caring were as simple as always just do it. Realistically, what to care about is about the most important question in your life. And not just your life, but all of life. From evolution to the serenity prayer, it’s all about investing attention and effort in those things that pay off and not in things that don’t. For us humans, that includes caring for people who will care back. Perhaps it also means being careful how we define care, neither accepting nor imposing the absurd rule that caring is always good.

“Excuse me, my unfocused words. I was flying blind. If you can find it in your heart . . . if you’ve got one. . .”
“Shame,” by Randy Newman from the album “Bad Love”

Decision theory recognizes that any yes/no question entails the prospect of being right or wrong, and that means four possible outcomes: A right yes, a right no, a wrong yes, and a wrong no. Thus there are two ways to be wrong: Saying yes when the answer is no (called a false positive or Type I error) and saying no when the answer is yes (called a false negative or a Type II error).

We’re all pretty good at reducing both types of error, at saying yes when we should say yes and no when we should say no. Indeed, all adaptation and learning is aimed at reducing wrong yeses and nos on life’s pressing questions.

It’s easier to minimize wrong yeses and nos when your situation is stable than when it’s changing. Think of wrong yeses as aiming too far left and wrong nos as aiming too far right: if the target is standing still you’ll hit it more often than if it’s moving. When it’s moving, you’re likely to shoot too far to either side of it.

Likewise when life-circumstances are in transition your ability to make the right decisions declines. When a child is in a teenage growth spurt, parents will over- and underestimate the child’s maturity a lot more than when the child is very young. Going through the reverse growth spurt from adulthood to senior citizenship, we over- and underestimate how old we are. Fast-moving targets and rapid transitions naturally mean more miscalculations.

Some rapid transitions are intrinsically disappointing, frustrating, and humiliating. When your child becomes surly, when your beloved loses interest, when your status is in decline, the losses are simply no fun. On top of that then, the increase in error that comes with aiming at a moving target adds insult to injury. When a partnership becomes strained on the way to estrangement, the strain is no fun, and it’s frustrating how often we misinterpret the changing relationship. After all, one of the joys of partnership is the ease you feel with the other person, the sense that you can do no wrong. As the partnership starts unraveling, it becomes hard to find the right words and actions, in part simply because the relationship is in rapid transition.

One effect of the adjustment by fits and starts to something both intrinsically disappointing and rapidly changing is what I’ll call the sorrytaliatory cycle—an oscillation between remorse and retaliation. On the yes/no question “Is it my fault things are suddenly so hard?” it’s easy to fall into an oscillation between strong yes and strong no responses. It’s my fault. No, it’s not—it’s his fault. We apologize and resent it. We lash out and regret it.

Sorrytaliatory cycles are the strained effort to draw new boundaries when the relationship is in transition, when you can’t tell where the boundaries belong and you wish you didn’t have to redraw them anyway.

Parents fall into sorrytaliatory cycles. Shocked and insulted by their child’s surly behavior, they lose their temper and in a fierce voice threaten to impose some draconian punishment. When they’ve calmed down or when the child bursts into tears, these parents feel remorse and apologize profusely, offering lavish concessions for having gone too far. Then, feeling taken advantage of all over again, they lash out once more.

Breakups, for me, have always been marked by at least the impulse toward sorrytaliatory cycling, and typically some acting on that impulse, which declines over time. I first noticed the pattern when my marriage ended ten years ago. I’d feel deep remorse for having manipulated my former wife, and then great resentment for the way I felt manipulated by her. At first, the sorrytaliatory cycles came hard and fast, then every month, then every few months. Then, noticing the pattern, I gave it a name. That in itself made for a very marked decrease in the cycle’s frequency and severity.

To name it is to tame it.

In one direction, ambition inspires you to ask, “Can I succeed?” To answer that question, you ask, “Well, how can I succeed?” Then you explore particular plans to do so. If you find a promising plan, you answer “Can I succeed?” in the affirmative, at which point you burrow into the hard work of implementing the plan. In this direction, the loop starts with the question “Can I succeed?”

In the other direction, it starts with an answer to “How can I succeed?” A feasible plan inspires you to answer the question “Can I succeed?” in the affirmative. You then implement the plan and stick with it, at least unless and until that plan proves less promising than you thought it would be. At that point you may be popped back out to the higher-level question, “Can I succeed?”

The two questions intertwine in complex ways, like a paradox or a Catch-22. You shouldn’t have hope that you can succeed unless you have a plan for succeeding. You won’t look for a plan to succeed unless you have hope that you can find one.

Which comes first, the hope or the plan? They depend upon each other. Necessity is the mother of invention but invention is also the mother of necessity, in that if you haven’t invented a way of achieving some goal, you’ll try to get over your need of achieving it. Where there’s a will there’s a way, but where there’s a way there’s a will.

So we pursue goals by trial and error, hypothesizing that there’s a way, convincing ourselves there is one (when there only might be) and then seeing how it works. That’s the only way we can deal with the uncertainty. I call it the try/buy dichotomy: You can’t really buy until you try and you can’t really try until you buy.

For example, do you love this date? Do you hope to commit to this person, to really buy in to the partnership? How would you know until you’ve tried out a full partnership? But how can you try a full commitment without having bought in to partnership? You say “I love you” to each other, in part to see if you do, because you can’t really tell whether you do until you’ve seen what it’s like to commit–and even though you can’t actually commit until you’ve seen. You shouldn’t play with people’s emotions. You shouldn’t kiss someone unless you’re really serious. But then how can you tell if you’re really serious until you’ve kissed?

This paradox is at the root of our trial-and-error process. It’s exploratory commitment, even though that’s an oxymoron. We play, literally half-serious, or else the game doesn’t engage us, half-joking or else it goes too far. It’s why so many people get hurt–and not in one way, but two, when someone takes the game too seriously or too lightly. It’s why we can be admonished in two directions when we admit we’re giving up on a plan. Tell a partner that you’re not into it after all and you might hear either or both of these opposite reactions:

Then you shouldn’t have played with my heart by saying you loved me.

And how do you know you don’t love me? You didn’t give yourself all the way over to the exploration.

FDR gave us a great simple description of the trial-and-error process: Do something. If it works, do it some more. If it doesn’t work, do something else. In practice, though, it’s harder than this, because we can’t always tell whether something is working or not. So success seeking isn’t easy. It’s not always clear when you should be asking “How can I succeed?” and when you should be asking “Can I succeed?”

Life involves lots of tough judgment calls–and I take up most of them in these columns. But the overarching tough judgment call is “Is this a tough judgment call?” In other words, when should you stick with a plan, calling it a no-brainer? And when should you wonder whether the plan is working? It’s the tension between decided and deciding, between the first and second level of analysis–between pursuing hope in a particular plan and hope that there is a plan.

When we declare hope as an answer, we try to evade the messy ins and outs between the two levels by simply hovering out at the second level, saying “Can I succeed? Yes, but please don’t ask me how.”

Last song in a series of three, here’s one whose target audience is not the middle-aged but rather the young and restless. It was inspired by an argument I couldn’t get started with someone who only wanted to talk about how the media was to blame for youth culture’s slide into promiscuity. I agreed with her about the media but thought other factors also contributed to shifts in attitudes toward sex and love. The friend would hear none of it and so I wrote this song. It mirrors ideas in an article I wrote a year ago called Mid-wife Crisis

To my friend’s point, I’ve finally found a copy of The Century of the Self, Adam Curtis’ four-part BBC documentary about the influence Freud’s ideas and family had on the rise of modern consumer culture. Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays founded the field of public relations and is credited with pioneering advertising’s now ubiquitous appeals to subconscious desires, thereby promoting insatiable mass-market demand for non-essential goods and services. Freud’s daughter Anna was instrumental in the design of US government policy toward mental illness prevention and treatment.

I anticipated a conspiracy theory but have been very impressed with this historical account of what I regard as the inevitable expansion of consumerism with its many troubling consequences. Do take a look at it if you get a chance.

My song emphasizes the ways that our modern conveniences weaken the bonds of marriage. Centuries ago marriage made sense as a way to accomplish many practical tasks, but today most of these tasks can be handled other, typically commercial means. As a result, partnership is treated either a recreational elective or a transcendental magical sexual or romantic union, rather than as a practical necessity.

But enough theory. Let’s rock to some theory.

Here’s a draft of me singing it with a virtual band: http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/allthatsleftislove.mp3

All that’s left is love

Microwave for meals

Day care keeps the kids

For risk you’ve got insurance

For company you’ve got vids

You’ve got Walmart for the larder

Central air for when you’re cold

Then they’ve got those nursing homes

To keep you when you’re old

If this were 1830 we’d need each other more

For every little want; for every little chore

What’s to stop a body from going it alone?

All that’s left is love.

Repairmen for the odd jobs

For husbandry the vet

Washers do the laundry

For sex you’ve got the net

Ipods to inspire you

Agribiz tills the soil

Machines to do it all for us

At least till we’re out of oil

If this were 1830 we’d need each other more

For every little want; for every little chore

What’s to stop a body, from going it alone?

All that’s left is love.

Marriage made a lot more sense back in the good old days

Why did they love thee? They could count the ways

We’re down to two-just sex and love

to justify a pairing

And that accounts for the absurd amounts

Of weight those two are bearing.

We’ve got hobbies to keep you occupied

And pets if you want to pet

When lonely you can join a club

There are shrinks for when you fret

For romance we’ve got the chick flicks

Which whet our appetites

Love comes alive: we feel deprived

On our dark and lonely nights

We pair, we care, we try to share

At least a little while

We break, we flake, big mistake

Marriage is still in style

It’s not that we’re free spirits

We’re married to the mobs

Dependent on the market

Addicted to our jobs

And it’s not that we are sinners

Obsessed and over-sexed

With less to keep us bonded

Who wouldn’t ask, “who’s next?”

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